Microchip FreeRTOS C Programming on 16 bit and 32 bit Microchip Microcontrollers — A 5 day course
Synopsis
This is a 5 day hands on programming course for experienced C programmers.
The course will cover the concepts underlying the use of pre-emptive multi-tasking operating systems, the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, and the need for careful and thoughtful design.
It will cover the standard patterns and issues associated with this paradigm such as pipes and circular buffers, producer - consumer patterns, reader - writer patterns, workcrew patterns, deadlock, livelock and priority-inversion.
In addition the fundamentals of topics such as interrupt handling, device driver development, and deployment, configuration and linker scripts, tuning and debugging will be surveyed.
This is a taught course with labs, with a split of about 40% teaching and 60% labs.
Objectives
This course helps attendees to develop an understanding of multi-tasking programming patterns and strategies for inter-process communication both in general terms and also specifically using the uCOSII API.
In addition attendees will also master the techniques for implementing device drivers and integrating them into the uCOSII framework will also be covered.
Contents
Overview of approaches to multi-tasking in embedded systems
Principles underlying per-emptive multi-tasking operating systems
The role of device drivers and interrupt handling in pre-emptive multitasking operating systems
Layered handling of interrupts
Soft vs. hard real-time
Overview of schedulers and scheduling strategies
The structure and design of the FreeRTOS operating system
- task management and the task state-machine
- resource management and control
Overview of the FreeRTOS Kernel structure
- kernel services and task scheduling
- understanding the FreeRTOS initialisation process
- timers and timer interrupts
Basic Principles of Implementing Multi-tasking Applications
- Context switching and its implications
- Designing and implementing simple multi-tasking applications
- Semaphores and their uses
- Patterns for controlling access to shared resources
- implementing the simple producer - consumer pattern
- the concept of a critical section
- pipes as an inter-process communication mechanism
- inter-process signaling
- readers and writers patterns
- messaging and message based application patterns
- task communication via messages and message queues
- combining message queues with State Machines - "Active Objects"
- interrupt handling
- hardware specific interrupt handling issues
- layered interrupt handling - patterns and strategies
- time and time handling
- uses of delaying tasks by having them sleep for a specified amounts of time
- monitoring task performance and profiling
- real time clocks and time stamps
- watchdog timers
- prioritisation - implicit and explicit
- basic concepts and strategies
- nested interrupts
- interrupt masking
Embedded systems anti-patterns - how to detect them and how to manage them
- deadlock
- livelock
- priority inversion
Power conservation
- importance
- general principles and strategies
- hardware specific issues (tailored to particular micro-controllers)
Performance and resource usage analysis and profiling
- collecting and monitoring kernel statistics
- estimating and calculating memory requirements
- memory management schemes
- estimating, measuring and documenting interrupt latency times, response times and recovery times
- simple error detection and error handling schemes
- safety critical aspects of working with FreeRTOS
Prerequisites
Attendees should have a knowledge of embedded C programming and a good working knowledge of multi-tasking concepts.